Conscience Matters

I picked up today's Boston Globe with a certain measure of gleeful schadenfreude. There, as the leading story, was the downfall of a promising literary career. My glee, if you can call it that, was not directed toward the occurrence of such an event; to put it straightforwardly, it was an unconscious manifestation of a personal vendetta.

A few months ago, I read a Living Arts article on Harvard freshman Kaavya Viswanathan's debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. The enormous buzz surrounding the then yet-to-be-published novel was about her unprecedented contract: two books at $500,000--for a college freshman! I was slightly repulsed by the young woman: she was articulate, smart, quite pretty in her photo, and now halfway to being a millionaire when she was not even halfway through college. I immediately disliked her. I found the deal ludicrous, and I admit, my reaction was equally, if not much more, ludicrous.

The catty impulses of my sex kicked in. Obviously, my repulsion was borne of the petty throes of jealousy, which also explains my amused reaction to the front-page story: Viswanathan being accused--on pretty solid grounds--of plagiarism. I'm not that horrible of a person; I can't help a drop of sympathy. The poor girl's reputation is being torn to shreds as the leading half of a "plagiarism theme" by the mercenary-minded Boston Globe. Still, I wonder if Viswanathan had ever anguished over her crime before it was plastered as a headline. We are rigidly unforgiving of plagiarists, forgetting how easily we ourselves would do it if we knew we would never get caught.

But Rousseau got it right: La conscience coupable vengera l'innocent.

Oh, how the bright have fallen. And how I delight in it still. I have always been dogged by my underactive conscience: Do other people fake a certain empathy in order to conform the social expectations ? I often find myself working hard to muster up the compassion that others seem to have upon visceral reaction. Perhaps I am being too hard on myself as I do have a conscience and I use it plenty. My unhealthy dose of cynism just likes to take over sometimes.

File this as reason #317 of why I do not want to go to Harvard.

ETA: This must have been a Freudian slip: I originally typed the book's title as How Opal Mehta Got Killed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.